Boardwalk Empire Season 4 Episode 1 Premiere Not—demanded a single mentality to rule the town. Success of the local economy was the only ideology, and critics and
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do-gooders Boardwalk Empire Season 4 Episode 1 weren’t tolerated. By 1900, a political juggernaut, funded by payoffs from gambling rooms, bars, and brothels, was firmly entrenched. For the next 70 years, Atlantic City was dominated by a partnership comprised of local politicians and racketeers. This unique alliance reached full bloom in the person of Enoch "Nucky" Johnson—the second of three bosses to head the Republican machine that dominated city politics and society. In Boardwalk Empire, Nucky Johnson, Louis "the Commodore" Kuehnle, Frank "Hap" Farley, and Atlantic City itself spring to life in all their garish splendor. Author Nelson Johnson traces "AC" from its humble beginnings as Jonathan Pitney’s seaside health resort, through the notorious backroom politics. A bustling little city by the seashore, totally dependent upon money spent by tourists, Atlantic City’s popularity rose in the early 20th century and peaked during Prohibition. The resort’s singular purpose of providing a good time to its visitors—whether lawful and power struggles, to the city’s astonishing rebirth as an entertainment and gambling mecca where anything goes.Boardwalk Empire is a colorful, irresistible history of a unique city and culture. Here is proof positive that truth is stranger and more compelling than fiction.
Following his battle with Gyp Rosetti, Nucky makes a peace offering to Joe Masseria while working the odds with Arnold Rothstein. While Chalky is busy running the Onyx Club on the Boardwalk, the impulsive Dunn Purnsley clashes with a booking agent. Fresh-faced Federal Agent Warren Knox arrives in Atlantic City to learn the ropes from Agent Sawicki. Gillian seeks custody of her grandson, Tommy, while trying to find a “good” man to keep the Artemis Club afloat. Eli's college-age son, Willie, turns to Nucky for career advice. Al Capone enlists his brothers, Frank and Ralph, to help him expand his business in the Chicago suburb of Cicero. Richard Harrow returns to his violent ways.
In one of the early episodes of Boardwalk Empire’s new season, which begins on HBO this Sunday, a young J. Edgar Hoover, while explaining why bootleggers break the law, says, “The moral dimension is missing from a criminal’s make up.” It’s an odd moment: Knowing what we know about the paranoid future leader of the FBI, anything Hoover says about morality is suspect. The actor delivering the line, Eric Ladin, serves it up authoritatively and smugly. He makes it sound pat, a hubristically simple explanation for what lurks in the minds of gangsters. It feels like we’re being encouraged to roll our eyes at Hoover, who doesn’t get the depth and complexity of the show’s protagonists, who each break the law for their own reasons, in their own ways.
Except that Hoover is exactly right. The moral dimension is missing from nearly all of Boardwalk Empire’s characters, who murder and maim, if somewhat discriminately. This is what passes for morality on Boardwalk: criminals with enough self-control not to kill everyone they lay eyes on.
Boardwalk Empire is as good-looking and well-acted as ever, but it still has bullet holes where its head and heart should be. As with last season, the very first sequence contains a gruesome murder, and the bloodshed just continues from there. A man gets his throat slit and another his head bashed in, a father takes a shot to the brain, a racist pervert gets stabbed in the neck so many times his head almost comes off, a woman shows up trampled in a mud pit, a tough is mowed down by machine guns, one man’s brains smear a wall, another’s insides spray a barn, another guy vomits his guts out, and someone else’s head gets macheted. That is not the full body count. Almost everyone who seems like they are about to gruesomely die on Boardwalk Empire gruesomely dies. The surprise and suspense comes not when some ultraviolent deed occurs, but when it doesn’t, which is rare.
When we left off last season, the Eastern Seaboard was gripped by a gang war with many casualties. In the first new episode, a lonely Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) puts an end to the war and, with it, the engine of the show’s story. Season 4 starts slowly, jumping from Chicago to Philadelphia to Atlantic City, N.J., to New York to Florida for bouts of unrelated drinking and death. Boardwalk has never been quite this bleak or meandering.
Jeffrey Wright plays Dr. Valentin Narcisse, this season’s guest star and, presumably, eventual threat to Nucky. Dr. Narcisse—he insists that everyone include the Dr.—is a powerful figure in Harlem who noses in on the new night-club owned by Nucky and Chalky White (Michael K. Williams). Dr. Narcisse, a light-skinned, highly educated, soft-spoken black man from the islands with well-formed, proto-black-power politics, does not get along with Chalky White, a dark-skinned, illiterate, self-made man from Texas. Dr. Narcisse watches Chalky working the floor of his club and tells him he’s like a “servant pretending to be king.” It’s a potentially meaty dynamic that escalates when Dr. Narcisse poaches Chalky’s right-hand man with promises of turning him into a rich heroin dealer. (Whenever the Boardwalk writers want to explore a heady theme, racial or otherwise, they always trick it out with sensationalism.)
Nucky’s former wife, Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), is still in the credits, but she’s MIA, having fled with her children at the end of last season. As one of the few characters who was not a cold-blooded murderer, she’s sorely missed, especially since every other nonprofessional killer on the show is engaging in their worst, most depressing behavior. Gretchen Mol’s Gillian Darmody is now a drug addict. Michael Shannon’s George Mueller, formerly the deranged but extremely law-abiding Agent Van Alden, is caught up with the Capone gang. Nucky’s sweet-faced nephew, a freshman at Temple, quickly shows himself to have a gangster’s instinct for self-preservation. Richard (Jack Huston), the man with the mask, is still acting as a hit man when the season begins. After mercilessly killing many people for money, he realizes he’s lost his way when he is unable to put down his childhood dog. A father sobbing for his life does not move Richard, but an old, dying dog does. If this is his moral dimension, I don’t want to know about his immoral one.
Boardwalk Empire was created by Terence Winter, who came up as writer on The Sopranos, a lineage that gets more confounding with each season of Boardwalk. The Sopranos’s David Chase was keenly attuned to the foolish, stubborn, soft-hearted, even ethically reprehensible ways that audiences thrill to violence. Viewers may have hoped that Tony Soprano wasn’t quite Tony Soprano, no matter how many horrible things he did. Chase knew better. Winter does not seem to. On Boardwalk, the violence is the thrill. If some of the characters are unhinged sociopaths, they only serve to make the hinged sociopaths gleam by comparison. A man like Nucky Thompson, with his impeccable suit and calm, reasonable manner, only murders and manipulates people when it is in his very best interest. He’s a model crime boss. Boardwalk Empire keeps mistaking him for some kind of hero.